Entertainment

Skype Files for IPO

Skype, which was sold by eBay to a group of private investors last year, is about to re-emerge as its own publicly traded company. The VoIP giant has filed with the SEC for an initial public offering that will look to raise as much as $100 million.

The price of Skype’s shares and the number of them to be offered to the public has not yet been disclosed, though the company was valued at $2.75 billion when it was sold in September of last year to investors including Silver Lake, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board.

When it goes public, Skype will immediately become one of the largest publicly traded Internet companies. The service has more than 500 million users, and according to its filing, brought in more than $600 million in revenue during its 2009 fiscal year. In recent months, the company has been focusing on a few key areas, notably its iPhone app (which now supports 3G calling), multi-user video calling and embedding its service on Internet-connect televisions.

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